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Posts from the ‘Technology’ Category

We’re very lucky these days that we have all kinds of technology to help us do our jobs better and more efficiently. Some of us are more apt to jump in and try new technology while others are a little unsure of new resources and how to use them. I think we can all agree we love technology, when it works, but when it doesn’t, that’s another story. What is supposed to make our lives easier can sometimes make them more stressful or more difficult.

Recently I found myself in a few of these situations. My graduate assistant and I have wanted to better utilize the technology we have available to us when organizing panels. She found someone who could participate virtually on the panel in addition to our in person panelists. It was great until we could see the panelist, but we couldn’t hear her and she couldn’t hear us. Eventually we just had to start the panel and my grad continued to trouble shoot until we finally decided to simply call her on the phone and put her on speaker. Other presentations/panels recently we’ve run into similar technology issues, once we forgot to select which audio to use so we had video and no audio and the next time we were diligent to make sure we figured out the audio, but the video wouldn’t work. You’d think this would be a little easier sometimes. I’ve been co-chair of the Technology committee for two years now and I still have trouble. I am not immune to these problems and I like to think I’m fairly comfortable with technology.

I say all this because when we reach these road blocks, it can be easy to say why bother and not attempt to use the technology the next time because you think it will let you down. I’m willing to admit that I’ve been frustrated in the moment and have thought about giving up and not bothering the next time. So, instead, I decided to make this the focus of my blog piece in an effort to encourage others to fight through that frustration. That’s my plan; I will be back at it with my fall programming to try to get it right, because I know it will be an invaluable tool for our students that can’t make it to the presentation/panel.

To make it easier, I have some tips for powering through frustration to get the technology to do what you want it to and to help us all do our jobs better.

Form a Committee: It’s easy to give up when it feels like it’s just you vs the technology, but if it’s you and a colleague or you and a small group of people that want to learn how best to use the technology, you’re sure to motivate each other to learn how to best use the resources you have. More minds are better than one anyway, right?

Google Common Problems: I know it sounds simplistic but this can sometimes be a really successful approach, especially if it’s something a number of people using the same tool have struggled with.

Reach out to others: If you’re still stuck, try your IT department or manager, talk to other colleagues, or even reach out to EACE friends/colleagues to see who has experience with this same tool.

Hold Training Sessions: Once the technology has been mastered (or at least it’s better understood), share the knowledge! Teach others how to use it so they feel more comfortable with the tool(s).

Try, try again: Don’t let one set back keep you from figuring it out!

Rachel Wobrak is a Program Director at the University Career Center & The President’s Promise at the University of Maryland. She works with the College of Computer, Mathematical & Natural Sciences developing programming/events, meeting with students and collaborating with faculty, staff and employers. She assists with the office’s social media presence by managing the Center’s Pinterest account. She’s a Co-Chair of the EACE Technology Committee and soon to be on the Board as the Director of College Member Services. Rachel has her MEd from the University of Florida in Student Personnel in Higher Education and her BA from the University of Maryland in Classics (proof you can find a great career with any major). Please feel free to connect with her on Twitter or LinkedIn.

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When I started at Wentworth Institute of Technology two years ago I never thought I’d be producing a radio show. Actually. I never thought I’d be producing a radio show.

But here I am. Mondays at 1 PM. Riffing with some of my favorite colleagues and talking careers.

Let me back up. Wentworth has this hip, totally accessible, award-winning radio station called WIRE (Wentworth Internet Radio). WIRE only lists a handful of their awards on their website, but every year they rake in the trophies – including, most recently, Best College Radio Station in Boston by Boston A-List. The coolest part about WIRE is they let staff and faculty in on the fun.

Enter my office, CO-OPS + CAREERS.

WITworks Radio

In an effort to get our message/advice/guidance out to the student body in a new and engaging way, our fearless Director signed us up for an hour a week. I can’t recall exactly how I was roped into this, but it’s definitely got something to do with my inability to keep my thoughts to myself.

How do you even manage a radio show?

We started out haphazardly. We’d brainstorm topics at lunch before our show – things that were relevant to whatever was happening that semester/month/week.

Then we started to bring in employers. This was a turning point for us – Google and Raytheon – these are our most-listened shows! (I guess that should have been obvious). Students can tune-in live, but they can also listen on-demand through the WIRE Mixcloud page. The numbers keep climbing and so we keep scheduling. To make it easier for everyone – when an employer requests on-campus interviews, we ask them to be on the show. Since then we’ve added four new employer interviews and no one has yet to turn us down. (And, everyone who has been on has been really excited about doing the show!).

Our summer plans: develop a schedule based on the office cycle of busy and quiet points, and the co-op season. We just completed a show idea brainstorm with the staff and I hope to poll our students, too.

Getting Your Message to the People

If you have access to a radio station on your campus (and the students are willing to let you on air) – definitely consider trying this out. Don’t have a radio station? Try podcasts. Or Facebook Live. (Check out Brandeis and their Hiatt Live videos… Career Cab is my favorite).

Bottom line? Try some out-of-the-box ways of getting your message to your students. They’ll start listening and you might just have some fun, too.

Lauren is the Senior Co-op + Career Advisor at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston. She works with biomedical and electromechanical engineering, and applied mathematics majors. She has worked in higher education for five years in both career development and residential life. Lauren and three of her colleagues write and produce their career development-focused show, WITworks Radio. This is not what she had in mind regarding “other duties as assigned”, but is still jazzed about it anyway.

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Co-ops and internships are integral to the success of students post-graduation; and the offices that support those programs must find effective ways to prepare them for these experiences. Our office, The Center for Cooperative Education and Career Development at Wentworth Institute of Technology supports nearly 900 students per year in their search for co-op, a graduation requirement for all majors.

We are all presenters. Whether we are sharing tips and tricks with students, training employees, educating clients, or outlining initiatives and perspectives with colleagues, we drive to make content more engaging, interactive, and aesthetically pleasing to our audiences.

What I enjoy most about working in an office that employs students is the fact that they are very honest when it comes to what’s considered “cool” or not. Before I embarked on the four-hour train ride to New York last week, I started to think about those words that one of our students left me with: “Don’t make us a Snapchat account, no one will follow it.”

This post is a fine example of the benefits of EACE and the great relationships formed within this organization. A fellow member, Demetria, and I have worked closely together for the last two years with her role on the EACE Bridges Blog committee and mine on the Tech Committee bringing us in frequent contact. Last month Demetria sent a long a few articles she found on topics she liked and wanted to know more about and suggested perhaps other EACE members would as well. She suggested a blog post and so here I am at your (and Demetria’s) service. Based on the article that appeared in Ragan’s PR Daily, I am going to talk about 5 of the “13 Instagram tools brands should be using” in today’s post.

I think the second biggest gripe I have with Instagram (the first being no toggle between accounts!) is the desire to schedule posts. I know it’s counter-intuitive to the “insta” part of Instagram but – let’s face it – it’s nice to be able to plan out some posts once in a while or not have your account go dark if you are on vacation. Here are two tools you can use for scheduling:

ScheduGram: lets you upload and schedule images across multiple Instagram accounts with the added bonus of being able to do it from a desktop. ScheduGram not only offers the ability to manage multiple accounts, it also allows for multiple users and bulk uploads. Another bonus: ScheduGram offers direct integration with Canva for designing images. The only downside is that it is not our favorite price: free BUT it is very reasonably priced starting at just $5 per week.

Take Off : gives you scheduling capabilities for FREE but is mobile-only and lacks some of the features of ScheduGram. The answer to our need of scheduling is there though and with that the platform also offers help in finding the best time to schedule your posts and suggests times when they’ll be seen by most of your followers. In addition there is an interesting feature that works to optimize your captions by analyzing your caption and then suggesting “relevant, high discovery hashtags.” Take Off also allows for multiple team members.

The third thing on my list for Instagram may be your number one and that is a way to get stats.

Iconosquare: I am going to start with Iconsquare because it’s most familiar to me after I covered it on our April 2nd Tech Tools Webinar. As I stated in the webinar the features I love about Iconsquare are: rolling month metrics; scores for your love rate, talk rate, spread rate; engagement stats that allow you to see which posts were most liked and had the most comments, and I could go on. Suffice it to say that I like Iconosquare and think you might too.

INK361: Another tool that offers a similar array of features as Iconsquare is INK361. This tool provides stats and the neat ability to add a circle of users and only see their posts (think Google+). You can also print from this tool and comment with emojis (HUGE!). The only negative thing I noticed were more ads on this site than Iconosquare but that can easily be overlooked.

For sharing it’s good old Repost coming in at #5. Repost is a popular app to use to share other user’s photos or videos while easily giving credit to the original poster. It is good to use if you are or will be doing this often while on mobile. If you mainly repost from desk and want to limit the amount of apps you have, you can also use iconsquare. Either way, having a tool to easily share users photos or videos that you may be tagged in or that pertain to your profile is a must.

A bonus from this article for me was learning about Instagram for Business – I really like the inspiration and resources available here.

I learned about a lot of great tools to use with Instagram from this article so check out all 13 of them.

Megan Wolleben

Megan Wolleben has worked at the Bucknell University Career Development Center since 2007, where she is currently an Assistant Director. She is responsible for the marketing and communications of the office, as well as manages the department’s social media presence. She is the co-chair for EACE’s Technology Committee and a contributing writer to the National Association of Colleges & Employers (NACE) “Tech Talk” column as well as co-author of the “Career Counselor’s Guide to Social Media”. Megan earned her B.A. and Master’s in Communication from Fordham University.

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EACE Blog contribution by Rachel Wobrak, Program Director, University of Maryland’s University Career Center & The President’s Promise

For the purposes of this blog post, these are three apps that help my productivity and keep me organized. Obviously, there are a ton of apps and websites I could mention here, but these three I use every day; well two I use every day and a new one I just discovered that I think will quickly fit that description. A big reason I like all three of these is because they can easily be used across multiple devices. All have web versions and app versions for your phone. I find they’re all a great way to keep organized across multiple devices when at work, home or on the go. You can share things from your home or work computer with your phone or ipad, vice versa or any combination. Another big plus…all have free versions that get a lot done. Some of these may not be new to you, but I will briefly sing their praises here.

Workflowy

credit: workflowy.com

If you’re like me and love a good to-do list, this is an app to pay attention to. It works in an outline format, very simple. You won’t get pretty graphics or colors. It is, quite simply, a white screen with black type, but it’s great for managing home and work projects. You can easily collapse topics or zoom in to see only what you want to see at any given time. You can have separate categories for work and home and as many subcategories and levels of indentation and bullet points under each that you’d like. They’ve got a really great tutorial video.

It’s really helpful when managing tasks or ideas. I’ve already started brainstorming programs I want to put together over the next academic year and have bullets underneath each for people I need to talk to, tasks to complete, and things to think about over the summer as I begin planning these programs.

Dropbox

I’ve used Dropbox for a number of years now. I know there are a ton of different things you can do with it and I’m probably a more basic user, but still feel I use it a lot. It’s an app to store and share

credit:dropbox.com

files, pictures, etc. It’s great to be able to access certain files at home, work and on my phone. I also put my most important documents there as a backup cloud storage. You get 2GB for free and by referring people you can earn more free space. You can also always pay for more space. I really like that I can have pictures I take on my phone automatically back up to my Dropbox account until I have the time to back them up on my home computer or external hard drive.

Dropbox is great for sharing files and contributing to work with another person. You can create a folder and share only its contents or simply share one document. It’s also great if I start a project on one computer and plan to finish it up or need to send it from another computer. For example an EACE blog post I might have started on my personal laptop but put finishing touches and submitted from my work computer.

Pocket

credit:Pocket.com

This is quickly becoming my new favorite app. When answering email or scrolling through Facebook or Twitter on my phone, I often find myself opening a new window in my phone’s browser when I find an article or website that I want to read. Sometimes I don’t have time to read it in that moment and don’t want to forget to come back to it. This turns into a long, long list of tabs on my phone’s browser or an email to myself with a link to open later. Pocket is my new answer. I can move them out of my browser, store them in one place (accessible by any of my devices) and tag them to make the list easier to sift through. There is an extension to create a button right on your browser on your computer or you can download the app to your phone and allow your phone’s browser to integrate and save directly to Pocket instead of opening too many tabs. I only just put it on my computer and phone yesterday and already I’ve found I’m using it a ton. I’m a big Pinterest user for articles, ideas or pictures I want to keep and store in specific boards for a longer period of time, but I find this is the perfect answer to articles I want to keep temporarily to easily find again later when I have a moment.

I’d love to hear what apps or websites work for you or if you have a different way you use these same apps. Please list them in the comments below or feel free to reach out to me on twitter. I love to learn about a good tool/resource.

Rachel Wobrak has been a Program Director at the University Career Center & The President’s Promise since 2010. She works with the College of Computer, Mathematical & Natural Sciences. She assists with the office’s social media presence by managing the Center’s Pinterest account. She’s a member of the EACE Technology Committee. Rachel has her MEd from the University of Florida in Student Personnel in Higher Education and her BA from the University of Maryland in Classics (proof you can find a great career with any major). Please feel free to connect with her on Twitter or LinkedIn.

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Megan Wolleben from Bucknell Career Development Center and Vanguard invite you to join the discussion of this timely topic.

Where? on the EACE Twitter Chat

When: at 12:00 today (April 14)

How?

What is a Twitter Chat?
A group of people who all tweet about the same topic at a designated time using a specific tag (#) called a hashtag that allows it to be followed on Twitter. Think of it as a virtual facilitated round-table discussion on Twitter.

Want to just follow the conversation?

Look for #EACE on Twitter or go to Tweetchat.com and type in #EACE.New to Twitter?

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EACE Blog contribution by Mary Alice Barrows, Assistant Director at William Paterson University of New Jersey

Google Hangouts have become a popular resource for both personal and professional use in 2015. We have seen an array of programs ranging from admissions Q&A sessions to employer/alumni panels. As an avid user of Google Hangouts, I wanted to explore practical uses for this platform in our career service offices. Read more